Events from the year 1860 in France.

• Monarch – Napoleon III

• 1 January - Paris administratively annexes neighbouring communes.
• 23 January - Cobden-Chevalier Treaty Free Trade treaty is signed between the United Kingdom and France.
• 9 April - Typesetter Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville sings "Au clair de la lune" into his phonautograph, producing the world's earliest known sound recording of a song. However, it would not be converted back into audible sound until 2008.
• 18 October - At the end of the Second Opium War, British and French troops enter the Forbidden City in Beijing.
• 24 October - Convention of Peking signed by Chinese with Britain and France.

• 11 February - Rachilde, author (died 1953)
• 25 June - Gustave Charpentier, composer (died 1956)
• 16 August - Jules Laforgue, poet (died 1887)
• 20 August - Raymond Poincaré, statesman, five times Prime Minister of France, President of France (died 1934)
• 26 November – Gabrielle Petit, feminist activist, anticlerical, libertarian socialist, and newspaper editor (died 1952)

• 29 January - Stéphanie de Beauharnais, consort of Karl, Grand Duke of Baden (born 1789)^[1]
• 14 March - Louis Antoine Jullien, conductor (born 1812)
• 31 March - Évariste Régis Huc, Catholic priest and traveller (born 1813)
• 28 May – Rosine de Chabaud-Latour, French religious thinker and translator (born 1794)^[2]
• 24 June - Jérôme Bonaparte, youngest brother of Napoleon, who made him king of Westphalia (born 1784)
• 22 August - Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, painter (born 1803)
• 3 December - Joseph Marie Élisabeth Durocher, geologist (born 1817)
• 17 December - Désirée Clary, wife of King Charles XIV of Sweden and a one-time fiancée of Napoleon Bonaparte (born 1777)^[3]